BBC 100 Women
When she graduated in August, 31yearold Palestinian Sara alSaqqa made history by becoming the first female surgeon in the Gaza Strip to graduate.
“I had a lot of ambitions and ideas about how to improve health care,” she says, hoping to one day open her own clinic.
But eight weeks later, his only wish was that his family would survive Israel's attacks.
“Everyone has changed their priorities and now all we think about is staying alive.”
Since graduating, Sara has worked at Gaza's largest hospital, Al Shifa, in the north of the territory.
She had October 7 off and remembers seeing her 17yearold younger sister getting ready for school.
“But we heard shelling and didn’t let them go,” she says.
When Sara looked at her phone, she saw the news that Hamas had attacked Israel. Gunmen killed 1,200 people and took around 240 hostages.
Since then, Israeli airstrikes and ground invasions have reduced swathes of the Gaza Strip to rubble and killed 20,000 people, according to the Hamascontrolled Health Ministry.
Sara was immediately called to work.
When he arrived, he said, he saw “a massacre with an avalanche of injured people.”
From the outset, officials were struck by the large number of people “with limbs amputated by shrapnel and various types of injuries caused by severe burns.”
When Israel began its airstrikes, it urged Gazans to leave the northern part of the enclave and move to the south, saying they would be safer there.
But Sara decided to stay.
“We worked continuously for more than 34 days and couldn’t go home,” he says.
He told the BBC how conditions quickly deteriorated: “After each bombing, hundreds of patients arrived at the same time and it was impossible to care for them all.”
Many sought shelter on the hospital grounds.
People filled every available space, baked bread in the hallways, slept on the floor and in closets, and tried to distract their children with games.
The hospital was struggling to obtain basic supplies such as medication and sterile gloves, and Sara had to decide which patients to prioritize based on their chances of survival.
'Helpless'
“I felt terrible. I was completely helpless,” she says. “I did my best with what little we had to treat patients. I was devastated that I couldn’t save so many innocent lives.”
However, there were moments of hope.
Sara helped deliver a child after she and her mother were trapped in the operating room one night when bombs fell outside.
Sara desperately tried to call a gynecologist to help her, but no one came.
At 6 o'clock I couldn't wait any longer. “I asked God to help me and save the mother and the girl,” she says.
The baby was born with an umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, but Sara managed to remove it and deliver the girl safely.
The mother gratefully named her daughter Sara.
One of Sara's biggest challenges was when communication stopped. She no longer heard from her mother, her four siblings and her grandmother.
When this happened, the family was on the way to Rafah in southern Gaza, and Sara did not know whether they were dead or alive: “I couldn't function, I couldn't do anything.”
Sara says she was afraid they would find themselves in a bombed place.
“The worst phase of my life”
But as the conflict escalated, Sara's challenges multiplied.
Food and water supplies were running low and “there was no electricity for the last week…we were able to survive with the bare necessities.”
Something as simple as receiving a piece of bread became a moment of joy.
When the lights went out, she had to move through the hospital's crowded corridors by candlelight, performing surgeries in near darkness while the sound of bombs could be heard all around her.
“I would describe this time as the worst of my life. I lived through hell,” he says.
As the bombs approached the hospital and it became clear that the Israeli army was about to invade, Sara feared that she would die if she stayed there and decided to leave everything behind and also go to Rafah to be with her to be family. who are now seeking refuge in their uncle's house.
However, the doctor did not make the journey south alone. He went for a walk with his colleagues and with his mother and the baby he had given birth to.
When the Israeli army stormed the hospital, Israeli authorities said it was a “targeted operation against Hamas” and claimed they had found an “operations center” there, although Hamas denied this.
No water or food
Describing her life and the wave of more than a million people displaced from Gaza, Sara says: “We have no water to drink or food to put in our mouths. Schools, places. Winter is here and we are not prepared, we have no clothes, no blankets, nothing.”
She still tries to use her medical training when she can.
“Every day we go out and help where we can because the shelters and schools need us.”
Sara says she worries about what the future holds for her and her family.
“This year was supposed to be my sister's last year of school before she graduates and starts her life, but now we have no idea what will happen.”
Like other Gazans, their hopes and dreams gave way to the fight for their own survival.
This text was originally published here.